Goooooooooon!

I totally loved Goon. Read it here, or here:

For a few years in the 2000s, one of my roommates was a skinny hipster Canadian who loved Belle & Sebastian and Alice Munro and David Cronenberg movies, and so it was surprising to me that the mix he made for the road trip we took to Montreal opened with the theme song to Hockey Night in Canada. Canadians like their hockey, and I think outside some areas of New England, most of the United States has no clue what all of that is about. I think many us think that it’s just bearded dolts in mullets beating each other up on ice skates. I know that this isn’t really what’s going on, since hockey is a sport that involves a great deal of athleticism, training and skill.

But like the baseball fans who love the HBO baseball satire Eastbound and Down(or Major League, back in the day), I think even the most die-hard hockey fans will adore the hilarious paean to hockey thuggery Goon. Ostensibly based on a true story, Goon is about a Massachusetts bar bouncer who becomes the star enforcer – also known as an assassin or a goon – in minor league Canadian hockey. It’s sort of like a hockey version of Invincible, in which Mark Wahlberg plays a bartender who becomes a Philadelphia Eagle. Goon, however, is a not really an inspirational story; it is a broad, filthy and violent comedy whose clear inspiration is the 1977 Paul Newman comedy Slap Shot. Continue…

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American Idol x Lord of the Flies

So, The Hunger Games opened today, and my review won’t go to print until next Thursday, so I’m putting it up now. I couldn’t have written a book about this movie, but I stayed within my word count, mostly. Here it is.

Over the last ten years, Hollywood has been obsessed with turning young adult sci-fi and fantasy series into billion dollar film franchises, and not always successfully. For every Harry Potter and Twilight there have been movies like The Golden Compass and The Dark Is Rising. While the Harry Potter movies eventually became watchable, even good, the rest of the franchises have been cinematic porridge: mushy, dull, forgettable. Compared to all of these, the film adaptation of The Hunger Games is Citizen Kane. Based on the first novel in the wildly popular Suzanne Collins trilogy about a post-apocalyptic dystopia where former rebel districts must send teen-agers to an annual fight to the death, The Hunger Games is a relative, not actual, masterpiece. It is exciting, inventive, infuriating, weird, long, and ultimately very entertaining. Continue…

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Busted

So, I laughed my ass off at 21 Jump Street, but the fear-of-gay-sex jokes got under my skin as I started writing the review. I don’t think I would have used the headline that LGBT Weekly ran with the review — “Excessive homophobia dulls this absurd comedy” — but it’s accurate. The version that ran here is a bit truncated, so here’s the unabridged version.

There seems to be two ways to turn a TV series into a movie. One way is to take the original show seriously and try to replicate the good stuff while making it grittier and widening the scope. This worked for The Untouchables and The Fugitive, while it was abject failure for The Mod Squad and The Last Airbender. The other way is to admit that the original show was cheesy or updating it would be impossible, so you make a wacky, preferably filthy comedy doused in enough irony to make John Waters smirk. The few times this was successful was in The Addams Family movies and, to a lesser extent, Starsky & Hutch and Charlie’s Angels. The movie based on the pretty lame 1980s cops-undercover-as-high-school-kids show 21 Jump Street (only remembered for giving Johnny Depp his start) takes the second tact, and – what a relief – it works. Okay, it more than works. It’s really, really funny – as long as you ignore the homophobia.

As in the original show, 21 Jump Street refers to the address of the headquarters of a squad of cops who go undercover as high school students to bust drug rings, chop shops, and so on. A slimmed down Jonah Hill plays Schmidt, a smart, but pudgy and awkward cop, partnered with Jenko (Channing Tatum), a dumb, but absurdly studly cop. In high school, they were nemeses, but in the police academy they realized their strengths and weaknesses were complementary, and they became best friends. After they make a series of ridiculous errors trying to arrest members of a drug gang, they are transferred to 21 Jump Street, which is run by self-proclaimed Angry Black Man Captain Dickson, played with great irony by Ice Cube. He assigns them to root out a drug dealing operation that may or may not have caused the death of a student. In the last seven years since they graduated, what is cool has changed, and suddenly Schmidt makes friends and Jenko is the nerd, and their attempts at fitting in reaches a level of vulgar absurdity that would never be allowed on TV.

As with most broad comedies, the plot is secondary to the jokes. Much of the humor in 21 Jump Street is physical, and Jonah Hill is shameless and expert at using his body as a punching bag, both actual and metaphorical. He also does comically outraged quite well, too. Channing Tatum is playing dumb, which means he was perfectly cast, but he also does a fine job lobbing one-liners and reacting to the ever-increasing absurdity of the case. Hill and Tatum are as mismatched as Laurel and Hardy, and their friendly and sometimes not-so-friendly fights are gleeful fun to watch.

The supporting cast is roundly great. As Schmidt’s love interest Molly, Brie Larson plays the same wise-beyond-her-years character as she did so expertly in The United States of Tara. James Franco’s brother Dave does a great job being beautiful, arrogant, and outmatched as the high school drug dealer. Rob Riggle, as the track coach, is as crass as The Office’s Ellie Kemper, playing the chemistry teacher hot for Jenko, is horny.

But an abnormally high – even for a vulgar, hard R comedy – percentage of the jokes in 21 Jump Street involve fear of gay sex, from anal sex as humiliating punishment to male-on-male oral sex as torture. While Schmidt and Jenko state clearly that they don’t dislike gay people, their and the film’s extensive use of gay sexuality as something to mock and fear belies a homophobic subtext that isn’t very funny at all. The film is ultimately about male friendship, and it’s sad that the filmmakers, including the screenwriter of the wonderful and progressive Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, felt the need to basically scream “no homo!” throughout the movie to make such a theme palatable to their target audience.

21 Jump Street
Directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller
Written by Michael Bacall
Starring Jonah Hill, Channing Tatum, and Brie Larson
Rated R
Opens March 16
At your local multiplex

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Kitsch-y

It doesn’t look like my review of John Carter ran in this week’s issue, so here it is in its entirety. Make your weekend movie choice wisely, my friends.

When you cast someone’s whose last name is Kitsch in a bound-to-be-cheesy sci-fi action film, you’re begging for a review that says that the movie is “kitschy.” And that would be perfect description of John Carter, since the film is “a worthless imitation of art of recognized value.” (Thank you, Wikipedia, for that apt definition.) In some ways, I thought I was watching some weird mash-up of two other kitsch touchstones, Flash Gordon and Stargate. Yet, I think the director Andrew Stanton, who gave us the Oscar-winning Wall-E, and the film’s original screenwriter Michael Chabon, who won a Pulitzer for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, were trying for populist high art, something along the lines of Avatar or Star Wars. But the film, despite its technical achievements and good, silly fun, is just two hours and 12 minutes of kitsch.

John Carter is based on A Princess of Mars, the 100-year-old novel that was the first of Edgar Rice Burrough’s enormously popular Barsoom novels. In these books, the people who live on Mars call their planet Barsoom, and John Carter is a Civil War veteran from Virginia who is mysteriously transported from a cave in Arizona to the dusty deserts of the red planet, where he falls in love with a Martian princess, befriends some green tribesmen, and gets into a lot of fights. The eleven novels in the series were credited as major influences of Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Carl Sagan, Michael Crichton, and even the work of NASA. Burroughs, who also gave us Tarzan, is arguably the greatest pulp fiction writer of the 20th century. While his work was certainly not kitsch, and it was certainly wildly imaginative, it was certainly not high art. So maybe John Carter is an apt representation of Burroughs’ work.

After a brief prologue on Mars, the film begins with John Carter (Taylor Kitsch) dying at a young age and leaving his massive estate to his nephew, Edgar Rice Burroughs. Among John’s belongings is a diary, which tells the story of John’s accidental teleportation from a strange cave to Barsoom, where he is at first taken captive by the Tharks, a tribe of giant, six-armed, two-tusked green men. John befriends both the tribe’s chief Tars (Willem Defoe) and his daughter Sola (Samantha Morton) before he inserts himself into a battle between warring humanoid Martians that occurs in the skies over the Tharks’ city. John rescues Princess Dejah Thoris (Lynn Collins, playing a feminist revision of Burroughs’ damsel in distress) of the city of Helium from the evil Sab Than of the city Zodanga, and, of course, Carter and Dejah fall in love. Sab Than has been given a strange, all-powerful blue zapper from some god-like beings and is out to destroy Helium – unless Deja marries him. There are sword fights, explosions, impressive special effects, a little romance, and a dialogue as wooden as anything James Cameron has ever written.

It should also be noted that on Mars, all humans speak with English accents. And they’re all played by actors best known for their roles on HBO shows like Rome, The Wire, and True Blood. And they all do the worst work of their careers, which isn’t terribly surprising since they’re acting on green screens and speaking words that would sound absurd coming out of Meryl Streep’s and Laurence Olivier’s mouths. Kitsch, in the first of his two mega-budget sci-fi action films that arrive this spring (the next is Battleship) and mark his transition from Friday Night Lights brooder to hopeful movie star, is fine – handsome, fierce, charming. But he is not very much of any of these things, and like Collins and the whole movie, while not worthless,  he is mostly forgettable.

John Carter
Directed by Andrew Stanton
Written by Andrew Stanton and Mark Andrews & Michael Chabon
Starring Taylor Kitsch, Lynn Collins, and Dominic West
Rated PG-13
At your local multiplex

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Rf55GTEZ_E]
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Hippies are still funny

Wanderlust isn’t that great, but I laughed and laughed and laughed. My review won’t be printed until next Thursday, bu the movie is already open, so here’s the review.

After seeing Wanderlust, I was exhausted and teary. Happily, it wasn’t a maudlin factory of crying jags, like some of last year’s Oscar bait. No: I just hadn’t laughed as hard at the movies since Bridesmaids. While not nearly as surprising nor as carefully and smartly written as Bridesmaids (which was deservedly nominated for an Oscar for Best Screenplay), Wanderlust does something similar: it mines the recession’s soul-crushingness for cathartic humor. And it gives Paul Rudd yet another opportunity to prove his meddle as the best comedic leading man working in Hollywood today. Reteaming with David Wain, with whom he did Wet Hot American Summer and Role Models, Rudd leads a mostly wonderful ensemble that laser-pointedly satirizes New York City real estate, HBO’s programming, Atlanta’s suburban sprawl and ennui, and the eccentricities of modern day hippies.

Rudd plays George and Jennifer Anniston plays his wife Linda, and they are a yuppie Manhattan couple who, as the movie opens, are buying a tiny apartment in the West Village. It’s a tiny studio but their real estate agent (Linda Lavin) convinces them that it’s a “micro loft.” And they convince themselves they can afford it, since Linda is convinced she’s going to sell HBO her documentary about penguins with testicular cancer. Just as her meeting at HBO goes terribly awry, the financial services company where George works is shut down by the SEC. George and Linda are then forced to move to Atlanta, where George’s horrifying boar of a brother Rick (Ken Marino, who co-wrote the screenplay) has offered him a job at his successful porta potty company. On the way to Atlanta, George and Linda end up spending the night at a bed-and-breakfast run out of a hippie commune called Elysium Fields, where the pot is stellar, the residents are spacey, and the love is free. When Rick’s racist humor, searing arrogance, and McMansion lifestyle get too much, George and Linda, broke and with nowhere to go, decide to try living at Elysium Fields.

That the lifestyle of the commune – or rather “intentional living” – isn’t going to work out for George and Linda is pretty obvious from the beginning. And it’s also obvious that the hippies’ default leader Seth (Justin Theroux) is up to no good. There’s always a snake in the Garden of Eden, and there’s never been a movie made about hippies that isn’t intent on picking apart their idealism and reifying the standard American consumerist lifestyle. And aside from Taking Woodstock, it’s the rare movie about hippies that admits how gay that community was and is; that the free love in Wanderlust doesn’t even hint at bisexuality is pretty lame and very cowardly. But Wain and Marino don’t want Wanderlust to break ground or make point, and certainly not a political. They just want you to laugh.

Rudd is usually best as the straight man playing off someone or something wacky or exasperating – he delivers sarcasm better than anyone – but in Wanderlust he has several scenes in which he gets to be insane. One, in which he’s psyching himself up for some free love, is, well, epic. Anniston, who is a pretty great comic actress, is fine and earns some good laughs, but her role isn’t as meaty as Rudd’s. Alan Alda, as Elysian’s grandpa, is similarly underused, though it’s always nice to see him on screen. Anniston’s current boyfriend, Justin Theroux is a sly, sexy foil, though I felt he was more of a device than a character – as was Elysian’s goddess, Eva, who Malin Ackerman phoned in. Ken Marino and Michael Watkins, who plays Rick’s heavily sedated wife, steal their scenes from Rudd and Anniston; their vicious parody of Stepford suburbia is nothing new, but it’s still wonderful to behold.

Wanderlust
Directed by David Wain
Written by David Wain and Ken Marino
Starring Paul Rudd, Jennifer Anniston, and Justin Theroux
Rated R
At your local multiplex

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